Nick Mckay

What was the inspiration for your artwork?

Both of these pieces were assignments for a matte painting class. The city skyline was inspired by those seen in the action and super-hero movie genre. The second is a 2D image of a pool table which was converted into a 3D projection using Photoshop and Maya. The camera work and night club background were inspired by the movie “Ant-Man.”

How did you create these pieces?

The City skyline was brought about through Photoshop and After Effects. Stock photos of various buildings and existing skylines were cut, customized, rebuilt, and color corrected to create a photorealistic collage of over 30 layers. These layers were then brought in to After Effects where a 3D camera was able to create a 2.5D projection of all the Photoshop layers. Doing this creates a realistic parallax effect which lends to a more convincing background.

The second piece is a result of Photoshop layers being projected onto 3D objects in Maya. By using the same approach in creating the skyline effect, we bring each object in a scene into Maya as a texture and using a 3D camera in Maya, project those textures onto 3D objects. The pool table and billiard balls scene here are all elements of a 2D photograph taken of a pool table.